[151503] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: $1.5 billion: The cost of cutting London-Tokyo latency by 60ms
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Anurag Bhatia)
Fri Mar 23 08:00:34 2012
In-Reply-To: <20120323115345.GF9891@leitl.org>
Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2012 17:28:58 +0530
From: Anurag Bhatia <me@anuragbhatia.com>
To: Eugen Leitl <eugen@leitl.org>
Cc: NANOG list <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
Yeah this is super cool!
I hope ISPs will peer well once cable is ready!
(Sent from my mobile device)
Anurag Bhatia
http://anuragbhatia.com
On Mar 23, 2012 5:24 PM, "Eugen Leitl" <eugen@leitl.org> wrote:
>
>
> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/122989-1-5-billion-the-cost-of-cutting=
-london-toyko-latency-by-60ms
>
> $1.5 billion: The cost of cutting London-Tokyo latency by 60ms
>
> By Sebastian Anthony on March 20, 2012 at 1:04 pm
>
> Arctic Link submarine cable
>
> Starting this summer, a convoy of ice breakers and specially-adapted pola=
r
> ice-rated cable laying ships will begin to lay the first ever trans-Arcti=
c
> Ocean submarine fiber optic cables. Two of these cables, called Artic Fib=
re
> and Arctic Link, will cross the Northwest Passage which runs through the
> Canadian Arctic Archipelago. A third cable, the Russian Optical
> Trans-Arctic
> Submarine Cable System (ROTACS), will skirt the north coast of Scandinavi=
a
> and Russia. All three cables will connect the United Kingdom to Japan,
> with a
> smattering of branches that will provide high-speed internet access to a
> handful of Arctic Circle communities. The completed cables are estimated =
to
> cost between $600 million and $1.5 billion each.
>
> All three cables are being laid for the same reasons: Redundancy and spee=
d.
> As it stands, it takes roughly 230 milliseconds for a packet to go from
> London to Tokyo; the new cables will reduce this by 30% to 170ms. This
> speed-up will be gained by virtue of a much shorter run: Currently, packe=
ts
> from the UK to Japan either have to traverse Europe, the Middle East, and
> the
> Indian Ocean, or the Atlantic, US, and Pacific, both routes racking up
> around
> 15,000 miles in the process. It=92s only 10,000 miles (16,000km) across t=
he
> Arctic Ocean, and you don=92t have to mess around with any land crossings=
,
> either.
>
> Russian Optical Trans-Arctic Submarine Cable System (ROTACS) between UK a=
nd
> JapanThe massive drop in latency is expected to supercharge algorithmic
> stock
> market trading, where a difference of a few milliseconds can gain (or los=
e)
> millions of dollars. It is for this reason that a new cable is currently
> being laid between the UK and US =97 it will cost $300 million and shave
> =93just=94
> six milliseconds off the fastest link currently available. The lower
> latency
> will also be a boon to other technologies that hinge heavily on the
> internet,
> such as telemedicine (and teleconferencing) and education. Telephone call=
s
> and live news coverage would also enjoy the significantly lower latency.
> Each
> of the fiber optic cables will have a capacity in the terabits-per-second
> range, which will probably come in handy too.
>
> Beyond the stock markets, though, the main advantage of the three new
> cables
> is added redundancy. Currently, almost every cable that lands in Asia goe=
s
> through a choke point in the Middle East or the Luzon Strait between the
> Philippine and South China seas. If a ship were to drag an anchor across
> the
> wrong patch of seabed, billions of people could wake up to find themselve=
s
> either completely disconnected from the internet or surfing with
> dial-up-like
> speeds. The three new cables will all come down from the north of Japan,
> through the relatively-empty Bering Sea =97 and the Arctic Ocean, where e=
ach
> of
> the cables will run for more than 5,000 miles, is one of the
> least-trafficked
> parts of the world. That said, the cables will still have to be laid
> hundreds
> of meters below the surface to avoid the tails of roving icebergs.
>
> The ROTACS cable path
>
> Each cable will be laid by a pair of ships: an ice breaker that leads the
> way, and a cable ship. Until now it has been impossible to lay cables in
> the
> Arctic Ocean, but the retreat of the Arctic sea ice means that the
> Northwest
> Passage is now generally ice-free from August to October; a big enough
> window
> that cable can be laid fairly safely. Existing cable ships (and there
> aren=92t
> many of them) are all outfitted for balmier climes, so all three cables
> will
> require the use of a polar ice-rated ship that has been retrofitted to
> carry
> cable-laying gear.
>
> Read more about the secret world of submarine cables.
>
> For more information on the Russian Optical Trans-Arctic Submarine Cable
> System (ROTACS), check out the Polarnet Project (machine translated).
>
> The Arctic Fibre and Arctic Link websites have information on the North
> American cables.
>
> [Image credit: New Scientist]
>
>
